Canada's socially conservative women's organization just went too far

REAL Women of Canada, an activist group composed of socially conservative women (mainly evangelical Christians), has done admirable work in supporting traditional family values, standing up against the marginalization of men’s rights by radical feminists, and promoting the rights of the unborn in this country.

Liberals, feminists in particular, dismiss them out of hand as relics from a discredited patriarchal past. But since they represent the views of a wide swath of Canadian women — and since, unlike most feminist organizations that wouldn’t exist without some form of government subsidy, they are self-funding — I always have given time and consideration to their views on what is and isn’t good for the health of Canadian society.

I don’t share all their values, but REAL Women’s contributions to public life, usually in the form of thoughtful policy papers on issues such as drug laws and child care, authored by their president, Gwen Landolt (who effectively is REAL Women), have commanded my intellectual respect and not infrequently my approval.

So it is more in sorrow than the deep anger that will surely be directed their way from other pundits that I must deplore Ms. Landolt’s attack on Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird for his criticism of countries that persecute homosexuals, and further deplore her stand on gay rights in general.

REAL Women issued a press release Wednesday, denouncing Baird for his “abuse of office” in awarding a $200,000 grant to “special interest groups” in Uganda and Kenya “to further his own perspective on homosexuality.” REAL Women also censures Baird for his behind-the-scenes attempts to dissuade Russia from imposing restrictive laws on foreign adoptions by gay couples and on “homosexual propaganda” (i.e., gay-rights activism).

Ms. Landolt is out of line here. What Mr. Baird does or does not believe about homosexuality is irrelevant to his job, which is to represent official Canadian positions. Our government, and most Canadians, perceive homosexuals as fully equal citizens under the law, including the right to marriage and parenting. Whether or not many Canadians are uncomfortable with those positions (as indeed many are) is not pertinent to this situation. Mr. Baird is not demanding other countries enact gay-marriage laws. He is reacting to punitive measures for the “crime” of being homosexual.

It gets worse.

Ms. Landolt told a CBC interviewer that gay rights is not a human rights issue per se. She said, “according to the culture and the religion of, you know, Uganda, it’s not a human rights issue. You can’t imply that every country has to take our human rights issues and plunk it down in another country.” When pressed to comment on the fact that Uganda has contemplated the death penalty for practicing homosexuality, Ms. Landolt responded: “It may be unwise by Western standards, but who are we to interfere in a sovereign country?”

Landolt’s statement offends against Christianity, which teaches that one may hate the sin, but must not hate the sinner

“Unwise”? With this stunning moral gaffe, Ms. Landolt has compromised years of dignified advocacy work, and worse, set at an unbridgeable distance well-wishers and occasional collaborators such as myself. Does she realize the implications of what she has said? And from whose moral-relativist playbook she has drawn this leaf?

Her statement, first of all, offends against Christianity, which teaches that one may hate the sin, but must not hate the sinner. The death penalty for homosexuality — indeed any express form of persecution — is hatred of the sinner. It is not “unwise”; it is unjust, immoral.

More important for most Canadians, any persecution of gays offends against democracy and the ideal of individual rights, on which our freedoms are based. If Ms. Landolt believes it is justifiable to ignore the persecution of people whose beliefs or behaviours she is unsympathetic to, as long as it is happening elsewhere, she has lost the moral authority to criticize persecution in other countries of those whose beliefs and behaviours she *is* sympathetic to.

Thus, in one fell swoop, she has aligned herself with anti-Semites who shrugged as Jews were persecuted in Russia, self-loathing Westerners who do not criticize the persecution of Christians in the Middle East, and feminists who do not censure the disgusting practice of female genital mutilation because it is “their” cultural custom.

It is shocking that Ms. Landolt, a woman of high intelligence, does not see the bright line between her right to express her own private disapproval of homosexuality, and her obligation to respect and support the right of all individuals to live their lives according to their own desires, as long as they are not causing overt harm to others, without fear of judgment or curtailment of their liberties by the state.

I think REAL Women may just have imploded as a credible organization. Again, I say that more in sorrow than in anger.